‘Hah! I did reverse psychology on you!’
And if I’d actually paid attention I’d have observed that she only appeared to have worked solidly since coming back from school, doing one part work to about four parts making toast, twirling a hairband round her pencil, glueing some ribbon onto her music folder, checking the weekend magazines for pictures of Lady Gaga and gazing.
I say this generation is more knowing, yet I think we find it harder to envisage them as capable adults than our parents and grandparents did with us.
When I was thirteen I got a weekend job as a waitress in a country tea room owned by two spinster sisters. I said I was nearly fifteen – I looked it – and for a Saturday job in a village, no one checked. The other girls were fifteen, out of school and working full-time; counting my tips with them produced the heady thrill of being among the grown-ups. So, after learning how to kiss and smoke, the big leap in maturity was getting a job. By eighteen I’d had several; most of us had.
And this now seems quite rare.
So lately I’ve been plagued by a new worry: what will happen when the children leave home? What will they study? Where will they live? How will they get jobs? And will they remember to lock the door when they go out? Jessica Mitford didn’t know you had to pay for electricity, but at least her excuse was that she was posh.
It’s hard to believe they’ll ever be capable of these things, because I find I can only really imagine them at the stage they’re at now. When they were babies, we couldn’t imagine them walking; when they began walking we couldn’t imagine them talking; and when they began talking we couldn’t imagine them saying:
‘Whatever. Can we go now?’
The sort of anxiety that’s begun to creep up on us – even on Perfect Peter at times – is now increasingly the norm. Here we are, our children well fed and dressed, with books and toys – not to mention gadgets – and yet we exist, many of us, in a state of low-level panic.
It does seem that those who survived the Depression and one or even both wars were less prone to unwarranted anxieties. When you’ve glimpsed the shadow of the Nazi jackboot looming over the Channel, you might not feel compelled to drive your child two blocks to a friend’s house, never mind watch over them on the slide in case they shoot off the end and scrape their knee. And if you’ve seen two or three empty seats in the classroom at the start of every school year, as my mother did in the thirties, you’re probably less convinced by anti-bacterial wipes.
Those of us born between the late fifties and early sixties were the first to grow up vaccinated against the major killer diseases, the biggest gift to British children since the 1870 Education Act invented the primary school. So you’d think we’d be chilled and even quite thrilled.
But instead of revelling in our good fortune at living in this place and time, we’re plagued by fears. What if our children cross the road and get run over? Make a cup of tea and spill boiling water on themselves? Walk to a friend’s and get robbed – or worse? Better take them, guard them, do it for them. And if someone’s horrible to them at school? Mean online? We feel every sneer, shove and lack of likes as if it were happening to us – even more so.
We’re hardwired to protect them, so it’s easy to forget that they’re continuously in the process of detaching from the mothership, and that our role is to facilitate that. When you make bread you knead it, then leave it to rise. But now, we believe that if we’re not constantly doing something – with them, to them or for them – we’re not parenting. The closest we get to Benign Neglect is letting them learn only two musical instruments instead of three.
I recently read about a woman who discovered her son was having sex at fifteen, a calamity that had befallen him because – she was convinced – he didn’t have enough hobbies.
There’s no time to lose! We absolutely must get them to start becoming more independent.
‘We must get them to start becoming more independent,’ I tell Peter.
‘You’re right.’
Compared with us at that age, they have it incredibly cushy. Thanks to their father’s weak-mindedness, they’re still, for instance, being brought glasses of water and so forth at supper.
And if I say:
‘Let them get their own!’
He says:
‘Well, I’m already at the sink.’
It makes me want to scream.
‘You won’t catch me doing that,’ I scoff, as I set off for school with PE kit, knitting and various other things Lydia’s left behind, because I pathetically want her to love me even more than she does already.
So I’m just as bad as him.
But we must try.
‘Lawrence can do the supper once a week – nothing too ambitious – and Lydia can start making her own packed lunches.’
‘Good idea.’
‘And stop picking up after them all the time.’
‘Absolutely,’ he says, putting away their shoes.
In his 1964 novel A Mother’s Kisses, Bruce Jay Friedman describes the hero’s agony as his mother bursts into his first college lecture, having flown from New York to the Midwest to bring him a sweater.
Nowadays, that wouldn’t qualify as satire.
At half-term Lydia goes to spend a few days in Wales with her friend Georgie and her family. Peter takes her to Paddington Station, and describes that bittersweet moment when they disappear into the stream of people.
‘She sort of floated away,’ he said, ‘like a little paper boat on the sea.’
‘They look so vulnerable.’
So when they turn round to snap at you, it helps.
‘Yeah! She knew I was waiting, so told me to shove off.’
When she comes back I offer to collect her, because although she’s just travelled a hundred and sixty miles across south-west England, she’s never come home on this route across London before. And I know that she can find her way, and will survive changing to the wrong train at Baker Street if it happens, but I go anyway, because I want to.
I find the last parking space in ‘Paddington Bear Quarter’ or whatever preposterous name they’ve now given that area, cut through the hospital loading bay and walk up to the barrier. There’s no sign of her. Don’t tell me she’s missed the bloody train . . .
I wait.
Then I text.
Then I see a young woman coming towards me in the crowd who looks like Lydia, but older, more self-possessed. She looks like Lydia in the future.
Show her you’ve seen her but don’t wave.
I venture a minimal smile.
And she smiles back.
It’s as if she exists in the outside world now, rather than in ours.
A Mermaid on Speed
We’re on holiday in Grenada.
It’s over thirty degrees, too hot to go on a walk to see the waterfalls in the interior – or anywhere much. So we read and swim until dusk, then go to The Owl, a little bar by the beach, where apparently they have crab racing.
The crabs are named after luminaries such as King, Obama, Kennedy – and, um, Brown: Gordon, we assume. As they weave their way slowly across the floor, we pick one each and make bets of one or two East Caribbean dollars, about 40p or 80p. We all cheer on our crabs – even some young Americans from the medical school, who otherwise don’t appear to mix much. A little light gambling in a bar is the ideal activity for pre-teens and they will remember it as a highlight of the trip.
The next day we’re meant to go snorkelling, but Lawrence and Peter are feeling a bit overcooked. Lydia’s already had quite a scary bout of sunstroke, when we had to call a doctor and cover her in damp towels. So they stay put, leaving me – the only one who’s really not good on boats – to go with her.
There are about ten other people on the trip. I don’t know what I imagined, but the boat is quite small and terrifyingly fast. While the other passengers pretend not to notice, I clutch the side, whimpering, in a stomach-clenching replay of the Madeiran cable car ride when I forgot I was
scared of heights. That time, Lydia sweetly did her best to reassure me that it was quite safe, while the two Germans sitting opposite explained how normal it was to be suspended hundreds of feet above a motorway in a tiny glass box. This time, she immediately leaves my side to go and sit right up at the front, leaning into the spray like a gleaming figurehead.
We drop anchor in the middle of the sea. Everyone else gets their masks on and steps confidently off the side, including Lydia – who shoots across the open water like a mermaid on speed, while I get in still holding the hand of the boat guy, who to make it worse is disconcertingly handsome. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have had to worry about the snorkelling. Now I’m just an anxious white tourist old enough to be his mother.
‘That’s my daughter!’ I tell him as she whizzes past, followed by: ‘I don’t think I can do this.’
‘Sure you can,’ he says.
At least she isn’t hanging around worrying about me; that feels like an achievement. My family were so unathletic, we did no sport or games and neither of my parents ever learned to swim; to be in the middle of the Caribbean, watching my own child moving through it like a seal, is beyond imagining.
I eventually let go of the poor guy’s hand, put my masked face in and see the coral and amazing coloured fish. I’ve done it! When we get back to land, Lydia is aglow – we both are.
And I realize that though I would have been disappointed in myself had I not managed it, we’re reaching the point where Lydia is increasingly surpassing me – not difficult in the water – and that’s how it’s meant to be.
It’s not my place any more to dazzle: it’s hers. And every time I recall the sight of her charging across the ocean, I feel incredibly happy.
It’s not just pride but also relief, that we’ve produced a physically confident child who takes life on her own terms. I don’t have to keep proving myself any more, or beating myself up for being crap at tennis, or never having tried skiing, or failing the audition for the nativity play choir after singing flat in front of the whole school. None of it matters any more.
‘So basically,’ says Peter, ‘you’re going to start living through the children.’
‘Yeah! It feels great!’
The thing about mermaids, of course, is that they never stay on land for good.
Postgate and Firmin’s Stars
Many middle-class parents worry about the pernicious influence of the media on the developing minds of their offspring, something we gave up on years ago.
Lydia is currently addicted to My Super Sweet Sixteen, about the ludicrously extravagant birthday celebrations of rich American teenagers, and True Beauty, in which model types compete to show that they are also Beautiful Inside. I manage to stick about four minutes of it, during which the contestants have to try to display sympathy when one of them gets chocolate on her gold shoes.
Her generation is being indoctrinated all right, to aim for fame by television. Luckily she has so far resisted the lure of The X-Factor and co., but then things take a worrying turn.
She is widely praised for her dryly humorous portrayal of Polly the Maid in the end of year school play, The Rocky Monster Show. A couple of other parents stop us in the car park. Then the drama teacher utters the words every self-employed parent dreads:
‘She could be an actor.’
At the age of eleven I joined my friend Tilly at a drama group – and not just any drama group, but the one run by the legendary Anna Scher. By fourteen I was going on auditions, rushing out of the house with the light in my eyes and no idea that I hadn’t a chance in hell. Not only are they a truly brutal assault on the self-esteem, you almost never get the part. Most actors are unemployed for most of the time, some for pretty much their whole lives.
There’s only one thing for it.
I make her sit through A Chorus Line, the film of the hit show which caused a sensation thirty years ago with the revelation that every high-kicking row of nobodies who dreamed of stardom was a mass of heart-rending internal struggles – and some were even gay.
In the middle of it, Peter comes in and says:
‘On behalf of my generation, I’d like to apologize for the hair in this film,’ and goes out again.
Sadly the hair is the most dramatic thing in it. Seen in the harsh light of 2010 sensibilities, the story is now quite dreary – as a non-dancer Michael Douglas had to play the choreographer sitting down – and Lydia utterly fails to get the message.
‘Why did you like this film again?’ she says, before drifting away to her knitting.
Luckily there is another hit from the past whose themes of insecure minorities and group survival versus individual self-expression have withstood the temporal tides. It’s also far stronger on both character development and narrative tension: The Clangers.
We start with the BBC4 documentary I have hitherto failed to persuade her to watch, about Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, who created the show. In it they explain how they built the sets, did the sounds, and even customized the camera. They made the armatures out of Meccano, which intrigues her as Peter still has his entire set upstairs.
We are already fans of Ivor the Engine, their leftist social vision as seen through the lives of an eccentric Welsh community and their stubborn yet loyal train, but The Clangers has somehow slipped past me.
‘I always just thought it was a bunch of faintly irritating characters who make a stupid whistling noise,’ I say in my defence.
‘Well, it obviously isn’t!’
We immediately order the box-set, which Lydia devours with a dedication and concentration rarely seen in an academic setting.
For the rest of the holidays she is never without her needles, a ball of pink wool and a downloaded picture of Tiny Clanger, all of which come with us wherever we go, but eschews Peter’s offer of exclusive access to his Meccano. He keeps the hundreds of narrow metal struts stored in the compact but shockingly heavy chest of drawers his father made for it in the sixties, when the evenings stretched out endlessly in the Time Before YouTube.
‘Actually, I’m going to use pipe-cleaners.’
Then I discover there’s an exhibition of models and drawings from British animation on at the Cartoon Museum. I design the outing genuinely as a holiday diversion, not a career nudge. But I can’t resist nurturing a tiny hope that This Could Be It. And Peter Firmin himself is giving a talk! This must be Fate.
I make sure we get seats in the front row, and afterwards tell the great man we’re among his biggest fans.
‘Lydia – show him Tiny Clanger. She’s made her own Tiny Clanger.’
Firmin takes the little replica and examines the embroidered red panels of the felt jacket.
‘This is good,’ he says. ‘Did you download the BBC pattern?’
‘What pattern?’
As soon as we reach home it’s clear – to me anyway – that for Lydia, immortality will be achieved not through speech, song or dance but wool.
What a relief. We’re looking forward to a future with no twisted ankles or backstage histrionics, no tears and slammed doors after yet another unsuccessful audition – no shouting ‘It should have been me!’ at the live transmission of the Oscars; just peaceful clicking and the occasional ‘Tch’ after a dropped stitch. That, and a house coated with fluff.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we are all in the gutter – but some of us are looking up at Postgate and Firmin’s stars.
Superpowers
When the kids were small, I couldn’t get them off to nursery fast enough. Weekends were exhausting, and the holidays a dreaded expanse of blank time. When Katarina started she could only do two days a week, and I looked forward to Tuesdays and Fridays with a terrible desperation.
Now I stop work eagerly at ten to four, so I can hear their jokes and witness every nuance of their thrilling journey through life. Hooray for school! When I don’t see them for eight hours a day I love them so much more.
I even look forward to helping with their homework. Or t
hem letting me pretend that I am.
‘Would you like to help me with my Latin?’ Lawrence says kindly, even though the nearest I get to helping is gazing vaguely at a word like navis and saying,
‘Is it something to do with ships?’
‘Good, Mum!’
He’s been trying to teach me to say: ‘The man is telling the people who are coming into the city to go out again.’
It’s just a question of finding the right moment to say it – possibly if I open the door to someone from UKIP.
I didn’t pay much attention at school after the age of about fourteen, so knowledge-wise, the only way is up. I remember nothing from Physics except making a little weighing scale out of a straw to weigh a Smartie and Lucy burning part of her eyebrows off in one of the few experiments we actually carried out, instead of using the stopclocks to play Just a Minute: ‘Kate: you have sixty seconds to talk about – lip gloss.’ And wasn’t ‘Mini, midi, maxi’ what Julius Caesar said? I spent History, which focused mainly on the Unification of Italy, dozing peacefully at my desk – though by the look of it, so did quite a lot of Italians.
So with Lawrence I feel a warm glow. I’m no longer a middle-aged woman marooned on the intellectual hard shoulder but his pal, discussing declensions before we go and make a stir-fry together for supper – OK, actually made by me. I even volunteer for those agonizing sequences of almost-but-not-quite-identical shapes known as Non-Verbal Reasoning that Lydia occasionally brings home, as if we’re in an Obama-style campaign with a slogan like ‘Together We Really Can!’
This is SO GREAT.
‘I don’t know if I ever want them to leave,’ I say. ‘In fact, I know I don’t.’
To my surprise, Peter – the normal one – feels the same.
‘Maybe what we need to do,’ he says, ‘is start focusing on the times when they’re really badly behaved, and concentrate on those. That should make it easier.’
Right!
Those of our friends with full-blown teenagers are definitely eager to see them move on. The children of the British middle classes are criss-crossing India, Africa and beyond – teaching, building schools, losing their passports and just being Out There. One is even cycling up – and I suppose down – the Andes; his parents seem thrilled.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years Page 11